The company that owns the Concord Monitor has joined in a civil suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the technology giants took copyrighted content without permission to train their artificial intelligence programs.
Newspapers of New England, which also owns the Valley News and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in New Hampshire as well as three Massachusetts newspapers, is among a group of print and digital publishers that own and operate nearly 400 newspapers that are parties to the suit.
The coalition is represented by Matthew J. Platkin, former attorney general of New Jersey. The civil suit claims OpenAI and Microsoft took original news content to build their artificial intelligence products, violating the Copyright Act.
“The publishers’ journalism was essential to the defendants’ explosive growth, and unless defendants are held accountable for stealing, stripping and misusing the publishers’ content, the AI boom defendants orchestrated and benefit from will be a death knell for local journalism — which remains the most trusted news sources in America,” the publishers wrote in their 55-page civil complaint filed June 24 in Manhattan federal court.
The publishers claim OpenAI and Microsoft “systematically and secretly crawled” hundreds of news websites, including content behind paywalls and other access restrictions, to copy articles and other original works onto their own servers without authorization.
All copyright management information associated with those works was then stripped, including ownership-establishing information like author credits, publication names, terms of use information and copyright notices. They accuse the technology companies of using the stripped content to train their artificial intelligence large language models, which “memorized” that material and likely reproduced it, verbatim or near-verbatim, in response to user prompts for years.
The lawsuit is not alone in pushing back against the use of online material to train artificial intelligence programs. Earlier this year, reference giants Encyclopedia Britannica and its Merriam-Webster subsidiary sued OpenAI in the Southern District of New York, claiming ChatGPT’s training software engages in “massive copying” of digital publishers’ copyrighted online content without authorization or remuneration.
